Record .net.au sale

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Boost

If you spend $18,000 on a .net.au domain name you’d want it to be good. Most Australians wouldn’t even know that .net.au exists! The one that recently sold is CreditCards.net.au:

Pacific Octane chief executive James Wester sold the domain to Pixel Capital founding director Roland Bleyer, who operates financial products aggregators creditcard.com.au and creditworld.com.au, under the Credit Card Network brand.

Bleyer purchased the creditcard.net domain for $138,000 in September, and at the time, told SmartCompany the company was looking at moving into the American market.

This .net.au sale was made around the same time, but was not disclosed.

James Wester said this morning the sale is only the beginning, as domains will continue to rise in price.

“They’re going to keep rising. Just as 20 or 30 years ago, when every Australian had to open up the Yellow Pages to find what they were looking for, the Yellow Pages made a lot of money and kept raising the price.”

So is it a good investment? Yes, if it is going to be used for a website. These are my three golden rules for domain purchases:

1) .com is king. Virtually any domain name that consists of a regular word or three will gain value over time.

2) Exact match keyword domains should be .com unless you are willing to put a lot of SEO work in. There are dozens of extensions that can compete with you, but if you have the .com it will have more resale value, and more type-in traffic.

3) Other extensions are OK if you are going to create a genuine website (not something that relies purely on SEO tricks or paid traffic). But it needs to sound appropriate. James.me is OK for a personal blog, but James.org sounds wrong.

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GoDaddy Copying Verisign’s Ads

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Boost

Here’s an image from Verisign’s BetweenTheDots.net website:

And here’s GoDaddy’s $240K print ad in USA Today:

Lame! It’s not like it is a reply ad in which they mock their competitor. It’s just a cheap copy.

When a company is so poorly run, you have to question how they treat things like security. And big registrars can fail through negligence – RegisterFly is a great example.

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GoDaddy Losing Customers

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Boost

In part this will be due to GoDaddy agreeing with the Stop Online Piracy Act, while companies more in tune with their client base like NameCheap are opposing the Act.

I suggest that GoDaddy sticks to having ads with pretty girls and that’s it. No blog posts, no mentioning their stance on topics. Because, like the elephant hunting fiasco, they have no concept of what they should and shouldn’t say.

 

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The .xxx Scam Is A Success!

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Boost

According to AP:

80,000 XXX domains were sold in presale and many companies like Pepsi and Nike lined up to purchase adult domains. The University of Kansas reportedly just paid $3,000 for a variety of XXX URLs.

GoDaddy sells them at $99/year. So that’s 8 million dollars already. Porn businesses have already indicated that they will not be using XXX because they don’t want their sites to be filtered out of browsers and search services.

So ultimately all that has happened is pseudo-extortion. It’s the same as a street prostitute asking for $99 to not stand outside a shopfront.

The only plus I can foresee is that those who bought generic porn XXX domains might use them to be legitimate gateways to the dark side of the web. Yeah right!

More at Mashable.

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Closing Auctions

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Boost

At domaining.com is a useful tool called Closing Auctions, and it does pretty much just that.

Closing Auctions is a list of domain names being auctioned at Bido, GoDaddy, Flippa, CAX and Sedo, showing those with just a few minutes left, so you can snipe a bargain. It only shows domains that have an existing bid, so at least someone has decided it is worth buying.

While other factors should be considered before making an investment, the tool displays:

  • Estibot value (via Valuate.com)
  • Searches and Frequency – use these as a rough guide only
  • CPC – how much bids cost in Adwords

I recommend setting the filter so that only those valued above $250 are listed.

And really, you should find domains you want by other means, and set an alarm to bid at the last minute. Purely using this tool means you might panic-purchase without fully investigating the domain.

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Versign, ICANN and the .com registry

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Boost

There’s an extensive article on this at domainarts.com, but in a nutshell:

  • ICANN tried telling Verisign not to monetize unregistered domains, back in 2003
  • Verisign wasn’t happy, so they sued ICANN
  • ICANN couldn’t afford to fight, because they are a non-profit org
  • A deal was made whereas Verisign will keep their control over .com forever, and will be allowed to increase prices

It costs almost nothing for Verisign to maintain the .com registry, yet they keep raising prices. It can be argued that customers can choose a different domain extension, but the reality is .com is and always will be the #1 TLD in the mind of the public.

That is why you domain costs are going up, yet again.

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.Me Domains Can Be Worth $$$

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Boost

Here’s an excellent example – sure it would be at the very top end of .me domain sales, but it points out that:

  • if the name makes sense, it can be valuable
  • if a few .me sites become well-known, the rest will have legitimacy

Three years ago Rick Schwartz, Michael Berkens and Ammar Kubba pooled their resources to invest in a handful of high quality one-word .me domains, including Meet.me – a name they paid $5,890 for. They just sold it for the astounding sum of $450,000

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Major Registrars Purchased

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Boost

Never a good thing – what is essentially a public service is sold to a business that wants to squeeze profitability out of it, and then perhaps sell it to someone else…

 On June 24th, 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that private-equity firms KKR and Silver Lake Partners, as well as a third investor, were near to closing a deal to buy GoDaddy.com, which has 45 million domain names under management.  

On July 1,2011 Go Daddy confirmed that KKR and Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures closed the deal. Although the purchase price was never officially announced it was widely reported to be somewhere around $2.25 billion.

—-

Web.com purchased Network Solutions for $405 million + 18 million shares. It was previously owned by an equity firm, so not much has changed.

?
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EnomCentral – increasing .com cost by $5

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Boost

Verisign have announced a small price rise:

… prices for .com registrations are set to increase from $7.34 to $7.85 while price for every .net registration will increase from $4.65 to $5.11

Registrars will be passing on the rise, and good ones like NameCheap are only raising their prices by 50c. Not EnomCentral – they’ve decided to take advantage of this by raising the cost of .com domains from $34.95 to $39.95 in January. I guess anyone crazy enough to pay such prices won’t really notice or care….

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NameCheap Deals for October

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Boost

SSL Certificate – PositiveSSL – $6.99 for the first year
(of course after a year you should have worked out the value/use you are getting from having a secure site)

Reseller Hosting Accounts now have Unlimited Domains
(so you can keep all of your websites in one place – if you deem NameCheap’s service to be sufficient for your needs)

Discounted Domains (com/net/org/biz) with – use OCTOBERFEST

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